[Naples, Fla.] Abbey Carpet & Floor corporate wears many hats — ad agency, web master, product procurement and pricing broker, among other professions — but its true objective is to develop a support system and to create growth opportunities for its dealer members.

The franchise of some 840 plus stores (including Abbey Carpet & Floor and Floors to Go), is dedicated to full-on support at every level. Product procurement, chairman and CEO Phil Gutierrez emphasized, is but one element.

“At the end of the day, what we do,” said Gutierrez, “is about being able to sell the people that come through the door in a profitable transaction.”
Abbey has gone through many permutations since its beginning as a franchise, even under Gutierrez who took over in 1978. “It’s been a long road since then and we morphed from just strictly ‘Here’s the supplier, here’s the prices, here’s the private brand from that supplier’ to where now we spend probably 80 percent of our effort on the marketing part rather than the buying part,” he said.

Gutierrez’s own store here in Naples — a 20,000 square foot space with an additional 6,000 square foot tile and stone store across the parking lot — exemplifies the franchise’s strengths and is a perfect example of what an Abbey store can be. Here, the dedication is in the details: displays are uniform and nearly every product is exclusive to Abbey — private branding is key to helping each store achieve healthy margins. This store caters to its local market by having an extensive assortment of tile along with a wide selection of area rugs. And a robust advertising program is in play including local and national advertising, which benefits Abbey stores in every market.

“We spend a lot of effort in creating our own advertising agency that does all types of production,” Gutierrez explained. “Things that an individual store cannot do — they don’t have the time, they don’t have the money and they don’t have the personnel to do that. So we spend a lot of effort and a lot of money producing websites, producing internal information between us and the store and the industry and the store.”
Whether its newspapers or direct mail, magazines, television, radio, whatever media it happens to be, Abbey has the capability of producing a store’s own proprietary advertising along with a proprietary, custom website, according to Gutierrez.

“We help with the maintenance of the website. They can change as time goes by — change product offerings, special sales. Whatever they want to do we work with them,” he said.
The same custom effort is taken with print advertising as well. Explained Gutierrez, “It is all done by us for them — an enormous amount of different things at no extra cost.”
Steve Silverman, president and COO, pointed out that as technology continues to rapidly change, Abbey provides its members the necessary tools to stay current and successful.

“Our role as a franchisor is to provide services to our members that they can incorporate at their choosing into their businesses to help improve profitability and in turn, their standard of living. It is not our role to mandate or tell our members how they should run their business,” explained Silverman. “The flooring industry, like most other industries, is going through perhaps the most dramatic evolution in its history — that being the importance of technology. Those flooring retailers that are not up to speed with their consumer website and with their ability to reach potential customers through social media and who do not incorporate business-to-business programs within their stores, will be at a disadvantage to those retailers that do. As a franchisor, we have taken the task of providing the latest in technology to all Abbey and Floors to Go members.”
Private branding is another area where the company helps its Abbey Carpet & Floor and Floors To Go stores succeed. “We’ve gotten a lot more sophisticated in our private brands that the store can offer the consumer. That differentiates them from the other specialty retailers. And differentiates them too from the big boxes,” Silverman said.

Abbey’s vast private program includes Softique Nylon by Alexander Smith exclusive from Mohawk and Infinity Nylon carpet collection by American Showcase, an exclusive fiber from Shaw, new in 2012.
“One of the things that we do is provide a private identity for our members that we call private label and within that private label we have private brands that are under an umbrella of a group of products,” said Silverman. “And the importance of those is that they protect our members’ margins.

“Private label has been around for 40 years but in in early 2000s, we added to the private label what we would call a private brand,” Silverman continued. “We did that first in broadloom. And in 2010, we added our own proprietary private brand by adding our own private fiber. Now, it goes through a grouping of products into our own identity in terms of fiber content.”
Warranties are another area that Abbey identified years ago as a competitive edge. “We started our own warranties about 10 years ago that are now popular throughout the industry — the customer satisfaction warranty. If the customer’s not satisfied, we will replace it free of cost within 60 days,” Silverman said, adding that this guarantee has nothing to do with a manufacturer’s defect but rather a simple matter of consumer satisfaction.

Today, Silverman is beginning to see breakthroughs in the economy in all parts of the country. “2013 is going to be a year where our members are going to have to build based on the strong foundation they have. The ones who are in business today are the survivors,” he said, noting that perhaps 25 percent of the retail market exited during the downturn. “Those who are in business in 2013 are those that survived the worst recession this country has seen,” he added.